Writer-director Noah Hawley may be best known for the Fargo TV adaptation, but from 2017-2019, he was responsible for – I’m just going to go ahead and say it – the single-greatest comic book TV series ever made.
FX’s Legion, loosely but lovingly adapted from the X-Men series of the same name, is a small-screen masterpiece: funny, eerie, intelligent, occasionally terrifying. Anchored by a brilliant lead performance from Dan Stevens, with impressive supporting turns from Aubrey Plaza, Rachel (“Tokyo Vice”) Keller, and Amber (“Prey”) Midthunder, Legion is a riveting three seasons of television. Anyone who liked WandaVision, or Loki, or Twin Peaks, or heck, even something as idiosyncratic as Atlanta, owes it to themselves to check out Legion.
All of which is to say, if you’re going to trust someone with your precious IP, it might as well be Noah Hawley. Provided, of course, you’re willing to let him get weird with it. That’s clearly what FX (again) and Ridley Scott had in mind when they recently handed Hawley the keys to the most sacred horror-sci-fi kingdom of all: Alien. Coming on the heels of Fede Álvarez’s decent if derivative Alien: Romulus big-screen adventure, Hawley’s brand-new Alien: Earth TV series aims to do for xenomorphs what Legion once did for the Shadow King.
So far, we’re mostly impressed.
Mostly.
Alien: Earth starts with a fumble.
Evidently missing the lessons of Romulus (or possibly having already been in the can before it released), Hawley’s new series opens with a distractingly callback-heavy prologue, with a too-familiar looking crew awoken from cryosleep aboard a too-familiar spacecraft where all hell is soon to break loose.
Look, it’s one thing to throw in a few easter eggs. It’s quite another to borrow shot composition – case in point, the space trucker-like crew gathered around a familiar looking table for dinner – and even casting – does every Weyland-Yutani ship have a company-issued orange cat, or what? – in an awkward attempt to wink and nudge the fans.
Mercifully, these familiar touchstones soon give way to something far more interesting – and genuinely skin-crawling – once we learn of the horrific cargo on board this science vessel: a menagerie of the galaxy’s ugliest creepy-crawlies, all desperate to break out of their hilariously under-secured cages. It’s a fantastic concept, and something that sister series Predator could probably benefit from: why deploy one blood-curdling monster when you can unleash a half-dozen?
It’s no spoiler to say this ship soon finds itself on a crash course with our beloved planet. Specifically, the near-future “New Siam” where the series’ main characters are based, including human-synthetic hybrid Wendy (nepo baby Sydney Chandler, maintaining a proud series tradition of female protagonists), her brother Hermit (Alex Lawther, very good), and Wendy’s surrogate father figure Kirsh (Timothy Olyphant, inescapably and delightfully weird).
With a crashed ship, a whole lot of smashed containment jars, and several groups with competing interests – the series’s infamous Weyland-Yutani Corporation; Wendy and her cohort; Wendy’s creator Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin, channeling Mark Zuckerberg by way of Joffrey Baratheon); and a few others we won’t spoil here – the setup is ripe for catastrophe. There’s nothing quite like watching competing factions torn apart by an uninvited guest, one who happens to drip acid-laced blood.
Given his horror-inflected pedigree, it’s little surprise that Hawley adeptly captures Alien’s more frightening elements, maintaining a pervasively eerie atmosphere punctuated by shocking moments likely to unsettle even hardened horror fans. (A particular non-xenomorph kill from the premiere still gives us the willies.) Elsewhere, the human drama and corporate machinations are interesting enough, though they can occasionally feel like wheel-spinning in between all the bone-crunching, gut-busting action.
Visually, Alien: Earth looks great whenever it looks real; that is, when the practical-effects xenomorph is on screen, or when the actors are clearly moving through a physical space expertly done up in the Alien aesthetic. The xenomorph is particularly well-realised – after literally decades of dubious CGI aliens, it’s nice to have a giant puppet (and/or dude in a suit?) haunting the corridors of this series.
Unfortunately, this also means that Alien: Earth suffers when it relies on computer-generated imagery, with backdrops – and certain alien foes – the product of obvious digital fakery. It remains to be seen whether this series can move past its CGI weaknesses, but, like too much contemporary horror, the digital effects are easily the worst aspect of the experience. Perhaps, with a bigger budget – and more production time – on any potential season 2, we’ll get more handcrafted monsters, and less cartoon bugs. We’re also going to choose to trust in Hawley’s ability to eventually explain away the continuity-breaking proposition that a xenomorph got loose on Earth two years before the events of the original film.
The initial season of Alien: Earth is set to run eight episodes, August through September, though Hawley has made no bones about the fact that, like Legion and Fargo before it, he would like to see this series run a few more years, experimenting with the new playground he’s found himself in.
Judging by what we’ve seen, there’s plenty of room for growth. So to speak.
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FX’s Alien: Earth premieres with two episodes on Tuesday, August 12 at 8pm ET on FX and on Disney+ in Canada.
